Humans Need Animals

Christina To , 11th Grader || 9.17.18

Human health depends on animal health in a variety of ways. Animal products are used in our daily lives, such as milk, wool, and leather. We often fail to notice the dependency we have upon these organisms, and the disappearance of these creatures would result in disaster and tragedy.

Of course, animals are our main food source besides plants. Every piece of meat we consume came from a live animal: beef, pork, chicken, lamb, etc. Animals are a major link in the environmental food chain of which we rely on. They provide the nutrients and energy passed on from producers and lower level consumers. If one level of the food chain were to be gone, a domino effect would cause to the entire chain to collapse. Would you be able to imagine a world without livestock to provide for our daily consumption?

Animals were often used for travel and work in the past. Oxen would be used to pull plows across the fields to loosen the soil tended for crops. Mules were used for back-breaking labor and carrying goods and horses were ridden as a main form of transportation from place to place.

Animal testing is common among scientists to experiment with new chemicals and medicines. They are technically our “safety shields” against harmful products, and many of them die/mutate due to these abnormal conditions. As biodiversity decreases exponentially due to human production of toxic fumes and habitat destruction, environmentalists are worried that human vulnerability to disease will increase quickly. The rate of extinction is 10,000 times higher than in pre-human times, causing the disappearance of any species to be much more dangerous. Biodiversity is an essential form of life that cannot perish; the whole system of nature would collapse if it were to do so.